← Back to context

Comment by cwilby

2 years ago

I just started learning Chinese about 2 months ago, to me it seems they stuff whole concepts into characters.

For example,

"去" (pronounced "Qú") is "going to the". "超市" (prounced "Chao Shi") is "supermarket" "去超市" (pronounced "Qú Chao Shi") is "going to the supermarket".

3 syllables vs 7 syllables.

To me, it seems that instead of composing letters into words to convey meaning, they have more letters that are mini-words unto themselves.

5 comments

cwilby

Reply
mook  2 years ago

Don't forget all the abbreviation. "超市", supermarket, is abbreviated from "超級", super, and "市場", market. The equivalent in English would be "sup-mark" or something along those lines. (Or in Japanese, just "super".)

  • Terr_  2 years ago

    Since we're now talking about verbal rather than written:

    > No matter how fast or slow, how simple or complex, each language gravitated toward an average rate of 39.15 bits per second, they report today in Science Advances.

    -- https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...

    • cwilby  2 years ago

      This tracks - it's difficult to speak at the same pace in Chinese as I can English. That said - are those 39.15 bits plaintext? Compressed? Encrypted?

      The size of a word does not correlate with it's concept - I still posit that some languages can transfer concepts faster than others, minus our baud rate.

      Edit: Or, perhaps I am not as gifted an English speaker as my bias has presumed :| For example, I had to lookup "syntagmatic".